Buchanan Ad Blames Bush for Subsidy to ‘Shocking’ Art

Republican presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan Wednesday began airing in Georgia a new attack ad that shows gay black men in various states of undress. The pictures were taken from the PBS documentary “Tongues Untied,” which was subsidized by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The narrator says: “The Bush Administration has invested our tax dollars in pornographic and blasphemous art too shocking to show. This so-called art has glorified homosexuality, exploited children and perverted the image of Jesus Christ. Even after good people protested, Bush continued to fund this kind of art.”

Bush campaign spokeswoman Torie Clarke called the ad “demagoguery” and “a blatant distortion of the truth. The kind of garbage Pat Buchanan has been putting on the air is an insult to the people of Georgia.”

Buchanan spokesman Jerry Woodruff said the ad “has nothing to do with anti-gay prejudice. It has to do with not spending people’s tax dollars on values that insult them.”

Buchanan has repeatedly assailed the NEA in speeches over the last week. Wednesday he again called it the “upholstered playpen” of the “Eastern liberal Establishment” and claimed the “scalp” of John E. Frohnmayer, who was forced to resign last week as head of the NEA.